The Empire of Wyrms
From dreams to dragons
This tale I tell is the among the oldest you will ever hear, only the creation of the cosmos is older. In the early dawn of creation the dragons were born. While the custodian gods rested their mother, our mother, the very world we call home dreamed of us, a race that would embody the union of the magicial and physical world. The first dragons souls came from the dreams of our cosmic mother. The earth, the sea, the wind, the volcanos they were the eggs from whence the first dragons would hatch from and awaken into the world.
The world in that dawn time was not a complex one, it was one of dinosaurs and primal power, it was our domain, our home, our mothers gift to us. The first dragons were crude and mercurial beings closer to the dinosaurs we hunted and battled for supremacy. Yet we had been gifted by the mother with the power of the dreaming and it allowed each generation to shape their bodies into newer stronger forms, alas some would fail to enact any meaningful path towards a higher state of being becoming locked in forms as the wyverns, drakes and other myriad of lesser draconic creatures you know of.
We are after a fashion an evolved race, the trial and errors of life taught us to dream new dreams to shape our minds and bodies and the best of our dreamers would hatch from their eggs wings spread wide with magic coursing through our blood and gifted with memories of every dreamer who had come before them. The first dragons knew this world was their birthright, they knew that magic and might was a part of their very essence. It was a wonderous time when a dragons scales, elemental attunement and a host of other features that we now owe to our parents were mutable things that shifted and changed as we dreamed. A new born dragon might dream of fire and awaken with the power to breath gouts of it upon their prey another of exploring the deep blue sea and develop webbed claws and the ability breathe underwater. They had avoided the pitfalls of the failed dragons who were locked in weaker, less intelligent forms and more focused on simple survival, from these first true dragons would form our first social gatherings and the roots of our society and learning.
An Empire of Wyrms
We built cities at first so that we could exchange knowledge and defend our young from the dangers of our primeval world. We carved lairs into cliffs and marveled at the gems and metal that were yet another gift from our mother and the valleys below became great amphitheaters where we would teach, learn and debate each other to settle our differences. What started as small enclaves dedicated to the trade of knowledge and ideas bloomed into great gatherings when we discovered The Words.
Our spoken tongue has always been unlike any other and when we discovered our words could tap into the magic aura of the multiverse through resonation with the magical nature of our very being we took a massive leap forward. You see dragon words are a primeval sort of magic with a power of their own that comes from speaking a things name. Most words as you might know them in our spoken language name things by a loose descriptor or nick name as a true name spoken in draconic calls upon a connection to the magical energy that empowers the multiverse. Point of fact were it not for us there would be no magic, all magical forms lead to The Words, the idea that saying or envisioning the correct phrases verbal and or through bodily gestures and in some cases pure thought and emotion allow for a resonate connection with the magical field that permeates reality as we know it. The talent and expertise of the being trying to call upon this of course will effect the results. For us magic was like clay and we used it to take hold of the reigns of fate for ourselves.
Our world today is surely full of monsters but the world we called home was one of towering behemoths and titanic beasts that now only dwell in lost places and hidden realms. We had no desire to tame such creatures but we came to require smaller beings capable of serving us and our newfound magical power would allow us to be as our great mother and create life. The first were the Kobolds, created from our blood and given the great honor of being our servants, of digging hidden treasures for us and protecting our homes from theft and wild beasts. Others came after some made with purpose others as experiments. Many of our servant races survive and thrive to this day albeit never having fully recovered the fall of our empire with nearly every reptilian, saurian or amphibious folk or hybrid beast of such being our doing.
With our servants we set to building vast cities, we wrote epics upon cliffsides and carved mountain peaks into statues. The dinosaurs we had once battled became our beasts of burden and livestock tamed by our loyal servants. It was a great age of math, philosophy, magical understanding and science and we etched our great works upon grand stone tablets that would later fall into the hands of the younger sapient species and allow many of them to share in our fallen empires knowledge and learn how to use the magic that permeates our mother-world.
Invaders from beyond
Our first true war came when we discovered that we were not alone. For ages aliens had been coming to our mother world and they had dared to attempt to colonize her. The apex predator in our nature was given to primal fury to this affront, of drawing their alien gods to our mother and terraforming her beautiful nature to alien design. We called a great purge of all that was alien and poisoned the purity of our mother. Wings of mighty dragons took flight and legions of our servitor species marched to war. We hunted the alien, destroyed it, tore their flying ships apart so they could never return home! Twisted cities were ground to dust and smoking ash.
The Great War for Prehistory
Our second great conflict came with a vast Undersea Empire, it was unknown to us for many centuries that a race of alien monsters vaguely resembling multi-eyed fish had long ago entered our world and formed an empire in the deepest darkest seas. They had access to alien magic of and were natural psychics able to shape life into aquatic horrors. The Empire of Fish (as we sometimes call them) worshiped alien power hungry beings and war was inevitable between us. For a thousand years we battled them in every way and In the end we crushed the empires of the wretched fish-things and slew their vaunted star-spawn avatar. We laid waste to any knowledge of their empire or the twisted outer gods they worshiped. Our victory was bitter sweet, as the wretched Star-spawn was cut down in an act of spite it laid a death curse upon our kind.
The curse of the ended dream
So drunk were we on the heady taste of victory that we were blind to the curse that was upon us. It was a slow and patient curse for a long lived race, it brought out our predatory nature and caused it to poison our philosophies. We had always engaged in the exchange of ideas and grouped ourselves with like minded dragons but after the curse this became an obsession and our factions started to engage in savage infighting and subterfuge against each other and we separated ourselves based on morality, ideals, and desires. Our young started to be born unable to share fully in their parents memories, they would only know shadows of what those who came before had known and with a vague sense of their parents ideology imprinted upon them. This would be followed by us loosing the power to dream the shape and powers of our physical form. We had become locked into form and shape of our parents. We soon fell into a civil war and battled each other over whose path was the right one. Metallic, Chromatic, Lung, Esoteric and many more, every great group of dragons was once a faction in the empire. We were so engrossed in our internal conflicts we had not noticed that who we had been was fading away. We only realized it too late the true ramifications of the curse that was upon us.
This loss did nothing to encourage the dragons of the Wyrm Empire to address the harm of our ever growing adherence to fracturing factions or the path of violence. The death curse that was laid upon our species would see reason swallowed by predatory instinct. In the waning days the factions turned on each other and our great cities were torn asunder. Our servant races fled in fear as well one would when their living gods were at each others throats. An empire that had ruled a world all came tumbling down in petty instinctual violence. Those dragons who survived fled, refusing to find equal ground or peace between them. So it came to pass that dragons came to be as you know them. Pale shadows of what we once had been. Mighty but lonely creatures slumbering ever longer as we age, on some level seeking out the lost power of the dreaming, highly intelligent, born with ancestral knowledge yet with the inborn drive and thirsts of a greedy apex predator. Our servitor races carried the remains of our knowledge but without our hand to guide them most fell into barbarism. Perhaps they too had tasted the death curse that was the end of our empire. Now you know, you know that mighty as we are we are the broken remains of something even more majestic, the survivors of an age beyond the comprehension of the modern world, proof that no empire stands forever not even one built through the majesty of dragons.
Related Timeline
2.Syann age of the Primeval Empires (PA)
Related Locations
Remove these ads. Join the Worldbuilders Guild
Comments